Crafts
20th Century Silver: Fine Silver for the Table from 17 Countries (Crafts Council Gallery, till 7 November)
Beauty and foolishness
Tanya Harrod
Until the 15th century the bedroom with its costly display of textiles was the epicentre of a grand household — the most prestigious site for an interview with a per- son of influence. By the 18th and 19th cen- turies reception and dining rooms became the arena for power-broking, the former with a background of furniture and paint- ing, the latter dominated by porcelain and silver. It was a shift from a shamanistic, queen bee kind of veneration of an individ- ual to a much more mercantile display of power through conspicuous consumption.
Today feasting lavishness is enjoyed by very few: lively companies, Oxford colleges and state banquets are the main surviving patrons of the grandest art of the silver- smith. In ordinary homes the kitchen is currently the place where status and con- sumption are on display. No one can quar- rel with the message conveyed by a newly installed Aga or a plethora of woks, waffle irons and orange juice squeezers. In this context silver — usually in the form of salt cellars and neglected napkin rings — lan- guishes tarnished in a cupboard. Their glit- ter has effectively been replicated by stainless steel.
The 20th Century Silver exhibition, there- fore, held at the Crafts Council's centre, 44a Pentonville Road, Ni, holds out the promise of explaining the technical myster- ies of the craft and throwing some light on how silver functions as an art form today. This is a beautifully mounted show with over a hundred pieces, ranging over the whole century and drawing on collections from all over Europe. It is limited to pieces connected with the table. Trophies and sporting cups — among the most presti- gious (and often most tasteless) examples of the silversmith's art — as well as church plate are excluded.
The show starts by addressing a mod- ernist functional aesthetic, traced from the 18th century through to the beginnings of the modern movement. Thus there is no rococo silver, and even Arts and Crafts work — including the wilful, strange designs of Henry Wilson — is seen as a preparation for the triumph of modernism. This is a rather old-fashioned approach to the history of design. It also makes the last part of the show seem anomalous. The selection of contemporary work shows modernism's purity and logic to have been largely abandoned: ornamentalism reigns.
What is missing from this show is the how and why of an activity uneasily poised between trade and art, between Garrard's the Crown Jewellers and Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft. The 'how' is important (and in fact covered in a handy Crafts Council guide, Looking at Silver, £2.50), because procedures like raising a flat piece of silver into the form of a bowl with specially designed hammers are far more mysterious to outsiders than, say, throwing a pot. Part of the hidden message of these objects must be the level of skill employed. Cer- tainly the most readable part of the exhibi- tion, a marvellous display of cutlery, is the most familiar. The language of knives and forks is one with which we all have an inti- macy. The 'why' — the intricate relations between maker, designer and designer- maker, between trade and craft, between demand and supply — is not easy to convey in an exhibition and perhaps its curator Helen Clifford was wise not to attempt it.
What becomes plain, however, is that sil- ver was an inappropriate medium in which to address certain modernist themes, above all the machine aesthetic of the 1930s. Interwar painters and sculptors drew inspi- ration from simplified techniques and from the intrinsic qualities of wood and stone. But silversmithing's modernism was closer to the world of industrial design than to the fine arts. The sleek, highly finished prod- ucts of the machine were, and remain, an important design source for modern silver. Ironically, great skill was employed in order that a soft, malleable material should suggest the effects of highly engineered steel. In the ancient world metalworkers originated shapes and effects which were imitated in other materials, above all ceramics. During this century the reverse seems true. Technology left silver behind.
The most impressive pieces in the show do seem to express some quality of truth to silverness that matches direct carving in sculpture and a sensitivity to mark-making in painting. To seek such a quality is both an Arts and Crafts and a modern response.
The objects that best exude ease with the material form part of a specifically English tradition exemplified by the post-war work of Robert Welch, Gerald Benny and David Mellor. Their silver is modern with 18th- century roots, restrained, even modest. It is as near as we shall ever get to egalitarian silver. Studying such work has the odd effect of making Christopher Dresser, the undoubted design genius of 19th-century silver, seem hard, stylised and relatively insensitive to the medium. It also shows up recent silver, not least because the domi- nant aesthetic of the bulk of the show is one of simplicity and care for function. The most recent work of the late 1980s and 1990s, therefore, seems wilfully irrational. In the aesthetic chaos of the 1980s conspic- Wine jug, 1987, by Werner Biinck uous display, unparalleled in the history of silver since the complexities of rococo, was unleashed. There are certainly some beau- ties here but also much foolishness.
Beauty and foolishness similarly co-exist in the accompanying exhibition, The Chem- ist'', Set, which sets out to examine the use of patination and coloration by contempo- rary metalworkers. In 1982 Richard Hugh- es and Michael Rowe co-authored a seminal reference book entitled The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Met- als. This show reveals the impact of their researches. Whimsical objects abound, but it is worth a visit simply to see one piece by Michael Rowe entitled 'Conditions for Ornament'. Anyone who ever doubted that objects could carry the poetic charge assumed to be the right of painting and sculpture should take note of this extraor- dinary work of art.
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